I have a personal experience: the command Factor[] is much more slow
in Mathematica 7.0 than in Mathematica 5.2. The difference reaches
10x!
2012/5/18, perplexed <yudumbo at gmail.com>:
> On May 16, 10:27 am, David Bailey <d... at removedbailey.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> I don't think there is much point comparing the speed of symbolic
>> calculations from version to version, because later versions may contain
>> extra rigorous checks - this is certainly the case with certain symbolic
>> definite integrals.
>
> On the contrary, I believe there is a very strong point, at least for
> me.
>
> Mathematica, of which I'm a great fan, has a lot of functions
> in different fields.
>
> Assume that I'm mainly interested in, say, elementary number theory,
> while I never use statistics or differential equations (or Wolfram
> Alpha...).
>
> Then, if none of the new features of v8 have an impact on what I do,
> and on the contrary the functions I use more often are slightly
> slower,
> then I should think twice about upgrading from v7 to v8.
>
>
--
Rodrigo